Dan Ariely: Adaptive Responses

[Applause] morning I want one of those so I want to talk to you a little bit today about adaptation and adaptation is the basic idea that we get used to stuff stuff happens and we get used to it on on many in many levels and usually when people think about adaptation the standard story is the story of the frog in boiling water you are not a story the idea is that you put a frog in hot water and the Frog is uncomfortable and jumps out you put it in lukewarm water and it stays happily and then if you raise the temperature just a little bit at a time the Frog rate used to that level of increased temperature until eventually the story goes the Frog dies in the hot water it turns out the story is wrong this doesn't doesn't happen but I'm willing to bet that if this was a committee of frogs they would stay there but the principal turns out to be a general principle and the basic idea is follow when good things happen to us we're happy when bad things happen to us we aren't happy and when good things happen we think to ourselves that we'll be happy for a long time turns out that's not the case when good things happen to us we're happy for a while but then we get less happy over time but that's adaptation the second part of it works in a reverse way when bad things happen to us we think we'll be miserable for a long time it turns out we are miserable but for shorter duration than we think basically things shift back to our general starting point so that's the general principle today I want to tell you two very different stories about about adaptation and they kind of take very different paths to adaptation and kind of talk about the range of adaptation we can have and the first one of those is adaptation to pain so the first one of the first classes I took as an undergrad there was a class on the physiology of the brain from a guy called Hernan Frank in tel-aviv and this class was very interesting in terms of the the content of the class but what also was interesting for me the tannin was a double amputee he lost both of his legs many years earlier and he made pain his passion so he started becoming a researcher of pain did a lots of interesting work on pain and because we were in the same hospital many years apart and knew some of the same doctors physicians and so on and we both shared lots of experience with pain often I would come to him after class and we would talk about pain academically and personal and in one of those discussion I came to him and I said you know hon I just went to the dentist two days ago and I realized I asked them not to give me any pain medications none over drilled and it was painful but I didn't care so much about it kind of a strange experience I'm not sure am i starting to enjoy pain what what's going on here and he said that he did the same thing that for the last 20 years he has gone to the dentist without taking any pain medication so now we're a little worried right okay what's what's happening to us so we decided to test it empirically we went to a Army veteran country club this was a country club that was only for people who got injured in different ways and during the service and we set up a table with very hot water and we asked people to put their arm in and we say put your arm in and keep it until the heat becomes pain this was called the pain threshold right if you put your hand in hot water you would realize after a few seconds it's hot and then you start being hurt we said tell us when it becomes painful and then keep it there and keep it there for as long as you can that's what people did and then we did the same thing with the other arm and the question was when would people tell us it starts hurting the interpretation of pain and how long could people sustain that amount of pain and we did this for many people and when we finished we took the medical files of all the people participate the experiment we went back to the hospital where Hannah and I used to be and we gave it to a group of physicians and occupational therapists and nurses and we said please take this pile and sort it into two types people who were severely injured and people who are not so severely injured so here we had two groups of people who had very similar life experience the only difference was on many years earlier when they got injured they had different severity of injury but remember this was many years afterwards so the question is what does they what does a severe injury does throughout throughout life and basically oops this is what happens when you give an Israeli a mouse let's see and and so did I keep on pressing it all along and the wrong thing okay so we had the people who were severely injured and we had the people who were lightly slightly injured and what happened the people were severely injured tolerated much more of the pain than the people who were likely injured so first of all Hannah and I felt we were not although strange you know this was kind of a more general thing I should say that we asked people never to keep their hand in the hot water for more than 60 seconds we didn't want anybody to get burned and on the severely injured group almost everybody we had to tell them to take the hands out right so there was a really substantial difference so what this suggests it did somehow an experience with an injury immunize people from pain it kind of gives us a different way of looking at pain now a really interesting part of the study came from another group of people we put ads in this veteran Country Club and many people came and two of the people who came we're not the kind of injuries we were looking for one person had an immune disease another person had an intestinal problem these were people with chronic injuries but you know they came to the lab they said could we be tested I didn't know what to do should I inflict more pain on them should I tell them that or unwelcome I know which one had of is worse but you know data is data so I decided to accept them so we had another group of people who had this chronic injury the only two of them and we shouldn't make too much of a big deal out of this but here's the question what will happen to those people with chronic injuries they had lots of experience with pain would they be like this severely injured group turns out their pain tolerance and threshold were even lower than the people who are likely injured and my interpretation of this is that people like Hannah and myself for us pain has been associated with getting better what do you think about when do we get pain it's physical therapy its operation its treatment of those things are very painful but they're connected - getting better and because of that over time we could associate pain with something positive right so the people who have chronic injury pain has a very different interpretation it means things are not going well and things are actually deteriorating and because of that they actually were much more sensitive to pain so when we think about pain I think there's kind of two aspects there's a question of how what's the signal we're getting and I don't think I'm getting less of a signal of pain than other people if you prick me or I get an injection or anything like that but what does change is the interpretation of this signal how bad is it how much fear do I have what what does it mean and this interpretation changes because of past experience so that's the first aspect of adaptation that the petition has to do with how we learn to interpret signals and think about them differently in a very different way I want to talk about the second story about adaptation which is social adaptation adaptation to what our position is in life so there is something that we call a sensitive matching or sort of live mating and the idea is that there's a social hierarchy you could sort all men from undesirable to more desirable and you could sort all women from undesirable to more desirable and if you do that you would find out that people basically kind of mate with people on their own level of desirability beautiful people marry beautiful people not so beautiful not so beautiful unbeautiful and beautiful this is kind of how things sort up now if you're very rich of your or if you're a British rock star you know things can compensate a little bit but in general we find this pattern of assaultive mating and like like everybody else when before I got injured I kind of knew where my society what my space was in society I mean we all have a feeling right we all know who date us and who would not who is in our league and who is not where we where we stack up into this and but then when I get injured you know for a while I didn't think about anything romantic when you have too much pain that's not high on the priority list but when I was getting a little bit better I started thinking about romance and I was thinking you know where would I fit in in this hierarchy right before my injury I knew who would date me who would not date me what will happen now right let's say before the injury I was seven if we give it some scale and now I was a four you know what what will happen will the women who would date me before stop dating me after all you know they had other option why would they go for me it's a competitive two-sided market and and I thought to myself you know what does it mean that I would have to settle right if we think about the Saadat evading and I'm now a four would I have to marry somebody who is a four right and and how would that feel would I wake up for the rest of my life looking bed next to me and said you know I really wanted the seven I thought I deserve a seven but I could get in the phone and you know I didn't feel I really changed right of course you're not change in many ways externally but I didn't think I kind of changed fundamentally about who I was I didn't like this idea that I will have to settle because somehow my market value in the signal's market have decreased I mean I realized that I was less valuable but I really didn't like this idea that I was less valuable so that was one thing the second thing that happened was that as I was getting better as the scars were getting healed and the transplants would catching a lot I actually got worse as a burn patient that was kind of surprising because now you think I thought that the moment my burns would get covered with new skin everything would be fine it turns out as a new level of complexity which is that scars really shrink so if I would sit for example like this for two hours I wouldn't be able to stretch my arms anymore because the skin would just shrink now we have to start slowly slowly slowly stretching my skin and it still happens this skin is very non flexible so for example if I pull my arm you can see my my neck is moving because it just is just kind of one piece of skin it doesn't have the regular flexibility and it keeps on shrinking and I have to stretch it all the time and that was awful because I felt you know not only did my body get burned and I was still the same inside but nobody could see me but now these scars were kind of fighting actively against me right I mean I imagine you had to work against your body every day kind of hurting yourself and trying to maintain the sense of motion in your body was kind of resisting you in this way and so quickly so this was terrible you know I felt kind of really a alienation from for my body and then I came to a resolution you know I didn't want to settle I didn't feel this was right I really kind of had a hard time with my body so my resolution was to be a monk you know no need to get involved in these questions right I will just live and intellectual life and ignore ignore any kind of physical aspect of life and it kind of helped me because all of a sudden I kind of got extra vigorous about pushing my body to its limits and stressing the skin more in half enduring more pain in the process but then what happened is that I had an operation and like many other operations every time I had an operation they could not put me in the bath to remove the bandages so they would bathe me in bed they would take the bandages off and so on and this was a while after I was injured I had an operation they were bathing me in bed and a very nice nurse was washing my stomach and upper thighs and something happened it haven't happened in a long time so I got an erection which you know embarrassed me and amused her she said it was a great sign of Ricki starting to recover and and it also made me realize that the monk idea was not touching not going to work out but it made me think about you know so how how is this adaptation going to work how am I going to find my space in society how am I going to make peace with it how am I going to be happy with what what I had and I came up with three theories the first theory is that maybe I will never adapt maybe for the rest of my life I would look at the person next to me and say up wish I could the second possibility is that if something like this happened we can change how we view what we like so imagine for example a woman could say you know I really not that attractive so what I'm what she is going to do is you know to start liking bald men I mean nothing against bald men but imagine that it's not people are not hiding there in the attractiveness scale you can say you know what I'm going to change my preference and then start liking something that is less popular by other people it could mean that we would change our tastes to basically be happy with something else but this is like the sour grape theory I can't reach here I'll start liking people in my my range and finally you could imagine that you reorder the importance of attributes so you say I can't be with very attractive people let me look for nice people how kind they look for some other some address attributes so we decided to look at this and the first way I looked at it was going to a website called hot or not and the way how to not works is that you see a picture of somebody and you get to rate them on a scale from hot from not too hot and after you rate them you get the average rating from other people of this person and you get the picture of another person in this case a more attractive okay so now the question is what will happen will attractive people with people who are very attractive view differently attractiveness than people who are not attractive kind of sour grape Theory people who are allowing the attractiveness start evaluating things differently could it be the case that people just somehow over optimistically shoot everybody will be kind of just a little bit over optimistic or could it be that everybody will value attractiveness in the same way and it turns out that that's the result everybody value attractiveness in the same way so if we go back to our plot it seems people don't change the perception of aesthetics it's not as if people who are low on the scale start enjoying bald hairy back some back tooth kind of activity as a preference could it be that people don't adapt on the Hottentot website there's also something called meet me when you can see pictures of people excited you want to meet them or not this is not about the evaluation of aesthetics it's about whether you want to actually try and meet them could it be that people are basically clueless well it turns out and that would it be the case that everybody would want to date the same people kind of not understanding our place in society no it turns out that people basically understand their place in society so we all appreciate beauty in the same way but then when it comes to meet people people basically try to meet people in their own level of attractiveness okay so this is the dilemma right we we all like the same attractiveness but we settle in some way by the way people are a little bit over optimistic in that regard and men are slightly more optimistic than women aim slightly higher than women so so the thing that was remaining was that people perhaps reordered the importance of attribute and the way to test it is we created a speed-dating event imagine the circles are with men and the diamond they're women and people talk to each other for five minutes and then they basically switch to the next person and talk to another and then at the end of the event they tell us who they want to meet but we also got them to rate person and how attractive and funny and sensible and kind and so on and what we basically found is that attractive people want to look for other attractive people less attractive people look for kind people sense of humor what turns out to be the mechanism is that people who are not people who are attractiveness go for attractiveness people who are not and they can't get that basically make sense of the world and adapt by reordering the importance of attributes by finding out and saying you know something else is important to me in this case sense of humor and kindness of other things which is a very sensible survivor mechanism the last thing I want to say is that while adaptation is incredibly useful mechanism it doesn't always work and I'll give you one example so in my case one of the things that has never worked for me is getting used to how I think other people look at me kind of never never get used to it and I think it's because the question is why I think it's because I meet lots of new people all the time and I get reminders of the fact that I look somewhat different and also when people shake my hand it's always a reminder right people anxious you know how do they shake my hand do they don't they and that's a continuous reminder of the fact that I'm not you know that I'm injured then I have some some residue now I know this will all make you uncomfortable for the next few days if you consider this but I think the lesson here is that there are lots of cases when we adapt but there's also cases where the patient fails and I think those cases are when we get intermittent reminders about the fact how things could have been and this kind of keeps us from adapting so adaptation is generally great we adapt to lots of bad things I'm a living proof to that sadly we also adapt to some good things that happen we wish we didn't and it's interesting to figure out in our lives what are the kind of things that we adapt to and what are the kind of things that we don't adapt to and maybe take this into consideration when we decide what kind of experiences to sue and not to pursue and that's it for me thank you very much [Applause]

Channel: poptech

Views: 85,875

Rating: 4.9543972 out of 5

Keywords: PopTech2010, Economics, Culture, psychology

Id: tCAkv4ggPgI

Length: 21min 2sec (1262 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 23 2011

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

I have likely failed to adapt. My heart just will not settle for someone I don't find attractive, though I'm unattractive myself.

Does this video want to make anyone else kill themselves or am I the only one?

[u/SykPaul]

I always thought beauty is in the eyes of the holder